All but eradicated in the Western world, rabies does not present the most obviously pressing topic for a cultural history. Surely there are other maladies with a more urgent claim on our attention.

But in this keen and exceptionally well-written book, rife with surprises, narrative suspense and a steady flow of expansive insights, “the world's most diabolical virus” conquers the unsuspecting reader's imaginative nervous system.

Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy mount a persuasively argued case for the importance of rabies as both a daunting public health issue and a persistent source of deep-rooted terror. It's a smart, unsettling and strangely stirring piece of work.

Not only is rabies especially lethal and all but unique among viruses for traveling through the nervous system, as the authors show, it also arrives with a haunting means of transmission. “As the lone visible instance of animal-to-human infection, rabies has always shaded into something more supernatural: into bestial metamorphoses, into monstrous hybridities.”

Tacking gracefully from case histories to the ancient Egyptians' view of the dog, from bats to Bali, microbiology to vampire novels, “Rabid” moves with the supple efficiency of its subject. Both the menace and meanings of the disease build inexorably.

The hard facts alone are chilling. Despite an effective and widely used vaccine, 55,000 people still die annually from rabies, most of them in Asia and Africa. The course of an infection is grim, with its stealthily delayed onset, horror-show hydrophobia, fever, pain, hallucinations and awful spasms. Even a chapter titled “The Survivors,” which recounts the ultimately successful ordeal of a Wisconsin teenager infected by a bat bite in church in 2004, has a grueling intensity.

The dog's double nature, as both man's loyal domesticated companion and a beast with “a dark side lurking behind the soulful eyes,” has given rabies its unsettling reverberations through the centuries. More broadly, “the distinction between the familiar, domesticated pet and the ungovernable wild animal came to be seen as analogous to that between civilized and savage races.”

“Rabid” finds this potent cultural strain examined in such diverse works as “Wuthering Heights,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and the “Twilight” books and films. In their dog and bat transformations, vampires partake of the intimate, even sexual nature of a rabid bite. “Vampirism is a dark, animal undercurrent that haunts the human — even the most refined among us, and even in our closest relationships.”

Not everything in “Rabid” is so darkly stained. The chapter on Louis Pasteur, who developed the rabies vaccine, unfolds as an exciting and vigorous narrative. So does the account of Bali's struggle to eradicate rabies from an island that had been completely free of the disease until 2008.

With its range and sure-footed command of its material, “Rabid” covers the ground like an animal that knows just what it's after and how to find it.